This wasn't just the best pasta of the year. It's some of the best pasta we’ve ever encountered—Italy included.

I need pasta in my life. I need fancy chef-pasta in shapes I can’t pronounce, and I need the butter-and-Parm elbows that I’m constantly pilfering from my five-year-old’s bowl at dinner.

But pasta fatigue is a real thing. Noodles are everywhere—not just at Italian restaurants. Many of these pastas are quite good, but the bar is so high for pasta-making now in the United States that they've all started to taste a bit formulaic, a bit expected, a bit meh.

This year, I needed a pasta wake-up call. I needed next-level noodles.

I found it in Venice, California, of all places. On the quieter end of Abbott Kinney Boulevard, you’ll find Felix. I’d heard that the pastas at Felix were next-level, that chef Evan Funke was a dough whisperer, that he’d given over valuable real estate in the restaurant to build his very own temperature-controlled lab where customers could watch all kinds of shapes, both fresh and dried, being meticulously handmade. I’d also heard that Funke’s pasta tended to be on the crunchier side of “al dente.” Rumors had it that influential restaurant critic Jonathan Gold of the Los Angeles Times left Felix off his annual list of the 101 best restaurants in LA because the pasta was so undercooked. But if there's one thing I’ve learned in my 18 years of dining out professionally it's to put all the chatter aside and eat the food.

I’m glad I did, because Evan Funke isn’t just making the best pasta of the year, he’s making some of the best pastas I’ve ever encountered—Italy included. He understands shapes, and he understands how certain sauces best complement the loops, spirals, and strands of any given pasta. I expect that from chefs these days. He knows how to create a sauce that binds and emulsifies with a noodle so that the two become a single eating experience—again, not rare to find in many great pasta dishes these days. What makes Funke’s pasta stand out for me and my colleague and fellow restaurant critic at the magazine, Julia Kramer, is its ethereal quality. “Delicate” and “airy” were two words I scribbled down in my notebook after dinner. There’s no other way to explain how in the world I could eat three bowls of his pasta and be hungry for more, which is exactly what happened on my first visit.

Funke also understands that fine line between remaining faithful to classic Italian preparations and adding his own twist to them. Too often chefs think that ten-ingredient or “creative” pastas are the way to go, when in fact, the classics are, well, classics for a reason. Take my favorite of Funke’s pastas: tonnarelli (a fresh, square spaghetti), black pepper, and pecorino Romano. It’s a study in simplicity and textures, a cheesy and fiery grown-up version of the pasta I loved as a kid. Good cacio e pepe is not rare, but this one leaves you scratching your head: How the hell can three ingredients add up to that amount of depth and nuance? But it's not just the cacio e pepe; every one of the ten or so nightly pastas—rigatoni all’amatriciana, busiati with pesto trapanese, or orecchiette with sausage and broccoli, for example—are probably going to be better than any version you ever had. And I'm including the ones you had on your honeymoon in Rome or the one at that famous chef's spot in New York.

If I do ever fall back into a pasta malaise again, I’ll know why: because every pasta going forward will be measured against the ones at Felix. But I’ll keep twirling my fork, one pasta at a time.